The archive · Developer & Business Tools · Product decision · 2024–2026
Statichost.eu bets a 100% European stack, no AWS or Cloudflare, can win
Eric Selin's Stockholm static host promises no AWS or Cloudflare at any layer; a 2026-09-04 launch story hit 366 HN points, two years after an 11-point debut.
statichost.eu
What the business is
statichost.eu is a Stockholm-based static website hosting service that deploys from any git repository, builds with any static site generator, provisions free SSL certificates on custom domains, and runs every layer from git deploy to CDN on infrastructure owned by European companies.
How it started
Eric Selin, a Stockholm-based developer, built statichost.eu out of frustration with 'European' hosting that actually ran on American clouds. He launched in February 2024 with a Show HN post pitching privacy-first static hosting on Hetzner — 'the classic story of something I built for myself that eventually became something more' — which drew 11 points and four comments.
What happened
The service kept building real usage. After phishing sites on subdomains got the whole statichost.eu domain blocked by Google Safe Browsing for about six hours on 2025-09-25, Selin published a detailed incident post that itself drew 240 points and 174 comments on Hacker News on 2025-10-10. Then FreeSewing — whose flagship site serves 324,000 registered users and spiked to 8.3 TB of bandwidth in a month after influencer posts — outgrew Netlify's shared builds and pricing and migrated; the January 2026 case study says FreeSewing served 4 TB across 30 million requests in its first two weeks on statichost.eu. In September 2026 the offer sharpened to '100% European': a European company, European infrastructure and European values, with branch preview links and a worldwide CDN still in beta.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
statichost.eu is a Stockholm-based static website hosting service built by Eric Selin around one promise: every layer of the stack, from git deploy to CDN, runs on infrastructure owned by European companies, with no AWS, no Cloudflare and no exceptions. It deploys from any git repository, builds with any static site generator, and provisions free SSL certificates on custom domains.
Selin says the idea came from getting tired of 'European' hosting that quietly ran on American clouds. He launched in February 2024 with a Show HN post about privacy-first static hosting on Hetzner, which drew just 11 points and four comments; the product nonetheless picked up users through 2025, and a Google Safe Browsing false positive that blocked the whole domain for about six hours in September 2025 produced an unusually candid incident write-up that drew 240 points and 174 comments on Hacker News.
The credibility turned into a flagship customer: FreeSewing, an open-source library for made-to-measure garment patterns with 324,000 registered accounts, had been pushed to 8.3 TB of monthly bandwidth when influencers discovered it in October 2025 and hit limits on Netlify's shared builds and pricing. After migrating to statichost.eu it served 4 TB across 30 million requests in its first two weeks with no manual intervention, per the company's January 2026 case study.
In September 2026 statichost.eu relaunched its positioning as '100% European' hosting, and the Hacker News story stood at 366 points with 167 comments as of 2026-09-05 — a very different reception from the 2024 debut. The open question is whether sovereignty-minded buyers form a large enough market against free tiers from Netlify, Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages.
What has to be true
- Selin turned a felt frustration — 'European' hosting that secretly ran on US clouds — into an absolute, legible product rule that reviewers could verify.
- A real flagship migration gave the bet proof: FreeSewing's 8.3 TB viral month and memory-hungry MDX builds were exactly what generic static hosts could not handle.
- Publishing the Google Safe Browsing false positive in detail built trust with privacy-focused developers and itself drew 240 HN points.
- A free first site and git-native workflow removed switching cost for the developers the positioning targets.
- The risk is scale: the promise is ideological, and free tiers from American hosts may still win buyers who do not care who owns the stack.
What can be applied
A values bet in a commodity market only lands when the rule is absolute and checkable: 'no AWS, no Cloudflare, no exceptions' beat the vaguer privacy promise of 2024.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-05 statichost.eu is live with a free first site and a homepage that lists FreeSewing, open-source projects, design studios and a well-known testing framework as users. Branch and pull-request preview links are 'coming soon', a worldwide privacy-focused CDN is in private beta, and the September 2026 Hacker News thread was still accumulating comments at the snapshot date. Selin has not disclosed revenue, paid pricing, funding, or whether the company is incorporated; on the public record it remains a founder-run service.
Sources
- Statichost.eu – European static site hosting
- statichost.eu: hosting estático 100% europeo
- Why FreeSewing with its hundreds of thousands of users migrated to statichost.eu
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